I find that hard to believe. His contemporaries made faces, like the ones you see here -- en face or three-quarters.

So, surely a passionate drawer like Leonardo must have made self-portraits from time to time.

So let's try to find them. I think that if we were to scan all of his work and look for self-portraits, we would find his face looking at us.

So I looked at all of his drawings, more than 700, and looked for male portraits.

There are about 120, you see them here. Which ones of these could be self-portraits?

Well, for that they have to be done as we just saw, en face or three-quarters. So we can eliminate all the profiles.

It also has to be sufficiently detailed. So we can also eliminate the ones that are very vague or very stylized.

And we know from his contemporaries that Leonardo was a very handsome, even beautiful man.

So we can also eliminate the ugly ones or the caricatures. (Laughter)

And look what happens -- only three candidates remain that fit the bill. And here they are.

Yes, indeed, the old man is there, as is this famous pen drawing of the Homo Vitruvianus.

And lastly, the only portrait of a male that Leonardo painted, "The Musician."

Before we go into these faces, I should explain why I have some right to talk about them.

I've made more than 1,100 portraits myself for newspapers, over the course of 300 -- 30 years, sorry, 30 years only. (Laughter)

But there are 1,100, and very few artists have drawn so many faces. So I know a little about drawing and analyzing faces.

OK, now let's look at these three portraits. And hold onto your seats, because if we zoom in on those faces,

remark how they have the same broad forehead, the horizontal eyebrows, the long nose, the curved lips and the small, well-developed chin.

I couldn't believe my eyes when I first saw that. There is no reason why these portraits should look alike.

All we did was look for portraits that had the characteristics of a self-portrait, and look, they are very similar.

Now, are they made in the right order? The young man should be made first.

And as you see here from the years that they were created,

it is indeed the case. They are made in the right order.

What was the age of Leonardo at the time? Does that fit?

Yes, it does. He was 33, 38 and 63 when these were made.

So we have three pictures, potentially of the same person of the same age as Leonardo at the time.

But how do we know it's him, and not someone else? Well, we need a reference.

And here's the only picture of Leonardo that's widely accepted.

It's a statue made by Verrocchio, of David, for which Leonardo posed as a boy of 15.

And if we now compare the face of the statue, with the face of the musician, you see the very same features again.

The statue is the reference, and it connects the identity of Leonardo to those three faces.

Ladies and gentlemen, this story has not yet been published.

It's only proper that you here at TED hear and see it first.

The icon of icons finally has a face. Here he is: Leonardo da Vinci. (Applause)

Siegfried Woldhek
Illustrator
Siegfried Woldhek knows faces — he's drawn more than 1,100 of them. Using sophisticated image analysis and his own skills as an artist, he's come up with a fascinating discovery about Leonardo Da Vinci.
Posted by: 癸

Vocabularies

Foreignthinking is a game, not a test. However, some people just want to verify what they did is correct or not,
not want to challenge themselves. That's why we have this new learning style.

Lazy mode is an efficient way to learn English. If you want to try it, please be our contributors as below~

How to see more learning materials for free?

In order to make this study camp keep growing, from May 2017, we decide to show learning materials for people
that are welling to provide at least "one" learning material for other people. You can be our contributors with this link:
How to create a new learning material.

The [BBC] [English at Work] series is also invisible in the home menu but will be displayed on the facebook fan page.
Other BBC series, or new learning materials after May 2017 will not be displayed on home menu or facebook fan page.

It's also good for you to learn English while you are doing it.
You will have abilities to analyze English paragraphs
and to compare the difference thinking way with your mother language.
So, it's definitely good to have a try.

Just keep learning, sharing, and having fun~

Gaming: Think in English

Find pleasure with your fingers! Here are some tasks that can help you think in English.
As an English learner, just take it easy and keep playing these games every day.

Step 1: Video

Watching the video in this article.

Step 2: Prepositions

The usage of prepositions is the key point to write graceful English sentences.
Click the blanks to help you deep learning into the usage of prepositions. Try this:

Well, Bob Russell was telling us about his work on nanotubes in his research at the microscopic level.

Step 3: Echoing method

Echoing method is an easy way to improve your listening and speaking.
After you listen a sentence, let the voice echoing in your mind before you speak it out.
You can play echoing method with
button, or
Echo mode option.
For those long sentences, you can use word-buttons as below to help you make it.

Step 4: Thinking method

Take a glimpse of the sentence to help you recall what happened in the video and what each character was thinking.
Then, reorganize this sentence in your mind and use your fingers to arrange words in a correct way. Like this:

The first word of this sentence is "Well," and the second word is "Bob". You can really play it after this guideline.

Step 5: Vocabularies

Define your own vocabularies withReview a word checkbox.
And then, you can play a game to test those vocabularies, same as you are playing prepositions.